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Virtual Selling: A Quick-Start Guide to Leveraging Video, Technology, and Virtual Communication Channels to Engage Remote Buyers and Close Deals Fast Blount
The Virtual Training Bible: The Art of Conducting Powerful Virtual Training that Engages Learners and Makes Knowledge Stick (Wiley, 2020)
Inked: The Ultimate Guide to Powerful Closing and Sales Negotiation Tactics that Unlock YES and Seal the Deal (Wiley, 2020)
Fanatical Military Recruiting: The Ultimate Guide to Leveraging High-Impact Prospecting to Engage Qualified Applicants, Win the War for Talent, and Make Mission Fast (Wiley, 2019)
Objections: The Ultimate Guide for Mastering the Art and Science of Getting Past No (Wiley, 2018)
Sales EQ: How Ultra-High Performers Leverage Sales-Specific Emotional Intelligence to Close the Complex Deal (Wiley, 2017)
Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, E-mail, Text, and Cold Calling (Wiley, 2015)
People Love You: The Real Secret to Delivering Legendary Customer Experiences (Wiley, 2013)
People Follow You: The Real Secret to What Matters Most in Leadership (Wiley, 2011)
People Buy You: The Real Secret to What Matters Most in Business (Wiley, 2010)
VIRTUAL SELLING
A QUICK-START GUIDE TO LEVERAGING VIDEO
TECHNOLOGY, AND VIRTUAL COMMUNICATION
CHANNELS TO ENGAGE REMOTE BUYERS AND CLOSE DEALS FAST
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada.
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For the past 100 years, letters and emails have been signed with – sincerely yours, very truly yours, or some form of pleasant goodbye. No more. “Virtually yours” has taken over. By storm. Actually, by hurricane. And it's here to stay.
Virtual selling will become the new normal, and the only question is: Are you ready?
Virtual meetings are not the new black they're the new normal, and most salespeople, sales leaders, executives, and entrepreneurs were and are woefully unprepared. They're (you're) looking at customers and coworkers from a laptop or phone, poorly dressed, poorly lit, in front of a closet or worse, in front of an unmade bed, trying to conduct a meeting or make a sales call that they (you) are unprepared for, BOTH mentally and technologically.
YIKES!
Luckily, you have this book. Virtual Selling will catapult you to the top of virtual Mt. Everest. IF, and only IF, you read it, study it, get prepared, make a game plan, and put it into action. (It's the same for climbing real Mt Everest, just warmer.)
Just a little background … I have been a fan and friend of Jeb Blount for more than a decade, and if you know him like I do, you know his passion, his positivity, and his performance are without peer. Not just a leader, an innovator. He is the perfect person to write this book because he lives in (and make bank in) the virtual world.
I have named Jeb “the hardest working man in sales business.” And his trademarked challenge, “one more call,” has forever branded his work ethic and his philosophy.
On one of Jeb's visit to our home, he spotted his book Sales EQ on my nightstand. He was proud but it was there because I am TOTALLY interested in what Jeb Blount writes, says, and does, both face-to-face and ESPECIALLY virtually and you should be, too.
Jeb Blount was, is, and always will be a student. A life-long student. A keen observer. A risk taker. And a winner.
He is always ahead of the curve, and this book is the CLASSIC example. Jeb is setting the standard in virtual webinars, virtual seminars, virtual training, virtual meetings, virtual studio, and as a result is the leader in virtual selling.
This book has the ANSWERS you need right now.
A playbook, a manual, and a bible about the new virtual world of sales. You see, the virtual sales world has been here for 20 years. It used to be optional. It was “one way to communicate. One way to sell.”
During the “pandemic period,” virtual was the ONLY way to communicate and sell. Tomorrow, virtual will be the BEST way, and the most cost-effective way, to communicate and sell. And Virtual Selling tells you the virtual “why” and “how to” that's not only impressive, it's an imperative.
From foundation to the top floor, this book takes you step by step through the virtual world of selling whether you take the fire escape or the elevator.
I promise you that Virtual Selling is GOLD. New gold. Unmined gold that every sales organization and salesperson is looking for to gain a leadership position and a competitive advantage in the mind, the pocketbook, and the loyalty of your customer the only places it matters.
This book is a (virtual) roadmap for the future of sales and selling. It addresses everything in detail with elements of understanding, strategies, tactics, and game plans that any salesperson beginning or advanced, tech savvy or technophobe needs to emerge as a winner in this new sales world.
NOW IS THE TIME. Jeb Blount delivers the virtual answers you can put into action and turn into actual money. And all you have to do is read the pages and take the actions.
Virtually yours, Jeffrey Gitomer, author of The Little Red Book of Selling
PART I Foundation
1
And, Just Like That, Everything Changed
A global pandemic. Panic. Social distancing. Working from home. An economic crisis.
In a heartbeat, we went from happy hours to virtual happy hours. From conferences to virtual conferences. From the classroom to the virtual classroom. From selling to virtual selling.
To be sure, we've sought out and used virtual communication channels since the dawn of man. It began with smoke signals and then written letters. We've even used carrier pigeons.
Innovation in virtual communication accelerated in the nineteenth century with the telegraph which was essentially very slow text messaging. The telegraph was soon disintermediated by the telephone.
In the 1980s, we fell in love with the fax machine, which was, likewise, disintermediated by email in the 1990s. In the ensuing decades, the online chat rooms of the 1990s morphed into texting, direct messaging, interacting on social media, and then interactive chat.
As early as 1880, an inventor named George Carey proposed a video phone. His idea was published in Scientific American. Forty-seven years later, in 1927, Herbert Hoover stepped into a video booth at Bell Labs and made a video call.
By the 1960s, AT&T had developed video technology to the point that it went to market with the Picturephone, but it was a flop. For the next 30 or so years, video calling failed to launch.1 Then, in 2003, Skype kicked off the modern age of video calling.
In 2007, the iPhone changed everything. This was quickly followed by FaceTime in 2010, Zoom in 2013, and then Facebook Messenger video calls in 2015. Finally, the convergence of broadband internet and inexpensive hardware made the video call accessible to all.
Today video calling, though underutilized by sales professionals, is the most powerful and effective virtual communication channel of them all.
Technology Meets the Moment
The global coronavirus pandemic of 2020 accelerated the adoption of virtual selling much like the global financial crisis of 2007–2009 accelerated the emergence of inside sales teams and the division of sales labor into business development, selling, account management, and customer success (land, expand, and retain).
Except that this was faster, compressing what might have taken 10 years to fully actualize into a matter of months. In an instant, to remain relevant and competitive, salespeople, account managers, entrepreneurs, and business professionals had to shift the way they were engaging prospects and customers. Likewise, prospects and customers had to shift the way
they interacted with vendors.
The evolution of virtual selling technology finally met its moment. Digital transformation, which for the past 20 years had been an inevitable yet slowly building tide, rolled over us like a tsunami. Suddenly, virtual selling became king.
Unlike so many other pivotal points in history, in which smart people were forced, out of necessity, to invent technology in order to meet the moment, this time the technology was ahead of us. We simply needed to catch up.
This is where we find ourselves. Virtual selling is the new normal. There is no turning back.
The Purpose of This Book
My objective is to teach you techniques that turn virtual communication platforms into powerful and effective sales tools, no matter what you sell, the complexity or length of your sales cycle, or whether you are an inside rep, field rep, or hybrid of the two. Virtual Selling is the most comprehensive and practical resource on video-based and digital sales skills ever developed.
This book will help you:
Become more effective with virtual communication tools so that you can connect, engage, and build deep and lasting relationships with other people.
Leverage technology, digital tools, and virtual communication channels to increase the number of connections you make and accelerate the speed at which you make those connections.
Blend virtual selling channels and tactics into your sales process to increase productivity.
Master virtual techniques to allow you to separate from competitors and gain a distinct competitive edge.
Make virtual selling more human.
As you dive into these powerful insights, and with each new chapter, you'll gain greater and greater confidence in your ability to leverage virtual communication channels and conduct successful virtual sales calls. And, with this newfound confidence, your success and income will soar.
Note
1. Stewart Wolpin, “The Videophone Turns 50: The Historic Failure That Everybody Wanted,” Mashable, April 20, 2014, https://mashable.com/2014/04/20/videophone-turns50/.
Is Face-to-Face Selling Dead?
I want to be clear from the start that I'm not an evangelist. I'm not an ideologue.
I despise and have no respect for the so-called “experts” and “gurus” who get on their high horse and shove their evangelism for a preferred technology platform or sales method down your throat. These are the same people who pontificate that their way is the ONLY way. They shout loudly that everything else in sales and business is dead.
These sad charlatans couldn't sell their way out of a paper bag. Somewhere, there is a graveyard full of the carcasses of former blowhard sales gurus who made a lot of noise, produced unimpressive results, and then died a quick death because their message was so shallow and self-serving (see social selling evangelists). Thankfully, real, frontline sales professions easily see through this bullshit.
This book is titled Virtual Selling. But this does not mean I am against face-to-face selling or, for that matter, against any particular type of selling. There are many products and services perfectly suited to field sales and physical face-to-face selling. Likewise, there are many products and services perfectly suited to inside sales and pure virtual selling. In the same vein, there are plenty of products and services that can be sold without the need of a salesperson.
Over the past decade, many companies have replaced field sales teams with inside sales, only to add field sales back when they realized that not having a face-to-face sales presence was costing them market share. Likewise, companies with pure inside sales teams have added a field sales presence to allow them to be more competitive and responsive to buyers.
Thousands of companies these days operate and sell through blended teams of inside and outside sales professionals, along with phone, email, chat, text and ecommerce. These forward-thinking organizations understand that there are different types of buying journeys, differing complexities, different risk profiles and different sales cycles.
The key is applying the right sales channel and approach to meet buyers where they are and how they prefer to buy. This will give you the highest probability of inking a deal at the lowest cost. Win probability and your ability to bend win probability in your favor is all that matters.
Probability versus Ideology
In sales, context matters. There are few black-and-whites, few right ways or wrong ways. In sales, no matter how hard the so-called experts might want it to be so, there is no one-sizefits-all. There is no “one way.”
What works in a transactional sale will not work in an enterprise-level sale. Selling to the government is different from selling to a business or consumer. Selling a physical product is different from selling a service or software. Selling complex, high-risk products and services is vastly different from selling a one-call-close product.
Can you close a high-risk, enterprise-level deal over the phone without ever meeting face-toface? Of course you can. Can you sell SaaS software solutions face-to-face? Absolutely. Can you do business over email or chat? You bet. You can conduct sales and close business faceto-face and through any virtual communication channel. In sales, everything works some of the time.
This is why, instead of ideology, I'm a student of probability. Probability is how I play the game of sales. Every move I make, every question I ask, every word I say, each sales communication channel I deploy, and when, where, and how I deploy it in the sales process is based on the probability that the specific move will generate the outcome I desire.
Virtual Is NOT the Same as Face-to-Face
Still, if your primary go-to market sales communication channel has been face-to-face, it's natural to fear that you won't be able to communicate effectively, build relationships, be as competitive, or make the same impact through virtual channels. You fear that virtual selling will lower your probability of closing sales.
This fear is not unfounded. The most effective way to build relationships and trust, resolve conflict, brainstorm ideas, gain consensus, present ideas, negotiate, and close deals is a physical face-to-face meeting. You know this and I know this, because we are human.
Successful face-to-face sales pros are masters at reading other people, responding to nuance, and using charisma as a competitive advantage. They have the ability to intuitively sense the emotions of other people and respond appropriately.
This is why so many field sales professionals were paralyzed with fear when the coronavirus pandemic made face-to-face interaction impossible. It was as if their sense of sight had suddenly been taken away. And, in reality, it had been.
The eyes manage roughly 80 percent of the information and communication you take in. Visual interpretation of the world and people around you consumes at least 50 percent of your brain's computing power. In fact, a far larger part of the brain is dedicated to vision than to hearing, taste, touch, and smell combined.1
When you are on face-to-face sales calls, you can see and interpret the entire picture. You see not only the person you are meeting but also their surroundings and how they interact with their environment. You also have the luxury of reading their eyes, the micro-expressions on their face, and the entirety of their body language. If there are other people in the room, you're able to read their reactions and nonverbal signals as well.
Emotional contagion is another form of sight that is significantly diminished in quality and
clarity when you are communicating through virtual channels versus face-to-face.
Emotional contagion2 is a subconscious response that allows us to pick up on the emotions of other humans without much conscious effort.3 Like invisible vibrations, emotions are easily transferred from one person to the other when we are together.
We are constantly scanning those around us for clues about their emotional state. We read between the lines, interpret those clues, and alter our approach to people based on our perceptions.
Though you can see the other person on a video call or hear their voice over the phone, it is not the same as being in person. It's cloudy, and never as clear as when you are selling faceto-face.
When you are face-to-face with prospects and customers, it is easier to:
Ask for the next step and know when to ask for the next step.
Tour facilities, get hands-on, and understand their real issues and problems.
Communicate clearly and minimize miscommunication.
Know when what you are saying or presenting is off-base or missing the mark.
Accurately read stakeholders and develop discovery questions organically, in the moment.
Compare the words that stakeholders say to their nonverbal communication for congruency.
Keep people engaged, because it is far less likely that they'll drift into social media, look at their email, or become distracted when you are sitting in front of them.
Build relationships.
Gain commitments. It is much harder for stakeholders to say no to your face.
Face-to-face human interaction is powerful, persuasive, and compelling. When you are there, face-to-face, it sends the message that the meeting is important, and it makes the person with whom you are meeting feel important. It demonstrates your credibility and allows you to fully leverage your personal brand.
Because face-to-face meetings require both parties to make a significant investment of time, it increases the probability that there will be meaningful outcomes and that your deal will move to the next step.
All of this and more are why face-to-face selling and human interaction are going nowhere. Going out on physical sales calls and meeting prospects at trade shows, networking events, or conferences face-to-face are not going away (at least not while we are alive on Earth).
Notes
1. Alan Kozarsky, ed., “How Important Are Our Eyes?” WebMD, May 10, 2019, www.webmd.com/eye-health/qa/how-important-are-our-eyes.
2. E. Hatfield, J. Cacioppo, and R. L. Rapson, Emotional Contagion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). ISBN 0-521-44948-0
When I started my company, Sales Gravy, in 2007, right at the cusp of the global financial crisis, I found myself in unfamiliar waters. For my entire career, I'd sold face-to-face. I was damn good at it. I never considered that there was any other way. But, my prospects were spread out all across the country. I had limited startup funds and could not afford to take the risk of buying a plane ticket, only to lose the deal. If I wanted to grow my business (and I did), my only choice was virtual selling face-to-face was not an option for me.
It required a massive mindset shift. I had to change my belief system about selling. Most of all, it required me to get past my fear and just do it. Out of pure necessity, and many mistakes later, I eventually mastered virtual selling.
Today, Sales Gravy has grown into one of the most successful training and consulting firms in the world. We have customers on every continent except Antarctica. Virtual selling is how we go to market because it is the most practical and cost-effective means of engaging prospects across the globe. We regularly close six- and seven-figure deals within a completely virtual sales process.
Everything Works—Blending Works Best
This, of course, begs the question: Do we ever make face-to-face sales calls? The answer is yes. When we have big, company-changing deals on the line, and it is practical, we visit faceto-face usually late in the sales process when it matters most. Likewise, in cities like San Francisco, where we have salespeople in the market, we make face-to-face calls.
When we are onsite with our clients, delivering training or providing professional services, we leverage those in-person engagements to interact with our stakeholders to anchor relationships and expand our business inside those accounts often displacing competitors who are not engaging face-to-face.
When our trainers and consultants are already in a city for a client engagement, we set up face-to-face meetings with prospects in the same city. Since we are already there and the cost to schedule an additional face-to-face meeting is low, it makes sense to meet in person because those face-to-face meetings almost always give us a leg up over our competitors.
The two early enterprise-level deals that made my company what it is today were closed on face-to-face calls. At the final presentation stage, I took the risk, purchased the plane ticket, and delivered my closing presentation in person. These deals were game changers and were so important that the cost of the face-to-face engagement to seal the deal in person was well worth it.
This is called blending, and it is the key to leveraging virtual selling to become more productive and win more often, at a lower cost to you and your company.
I'm a student of probability rather than an evangelist. As we've established, everything works. You just need to calculate the probability that using a particular approach, at a particular time, with a particular opportunity will improve the probability that you get the appointment, advance the opportunity, close the deal, expand the revenue within your account, or renew the contract AND that the approach you choose, relative to its probability, is worth the cost.
Will Customers and Prospects Accept Virtual Selling?
Here are five truths:
1. Most of your prospects and customers would prefer to meet with you face-to-face prior to making an important or risky decision. They want to know they can trust you. Since so much of human communication is visual, seeing you face-to-face helps them feel that they are making a better decision.
2. If prospects and customers are given a choice to meet face-to-face, most will.
3. If the only option to meet with you is on a virtual call phone or video most prospects and customers will accept that option.
4. The majority of your prospects and customers will be comfortable with at least some of the steps of the sales process being virtual.
5. Most of the mental hang-ups about virtual selling are with you, not your stakeholders.
When I'm working with inside sales professionals on virtual selling skills, the biggest fear they have is engaging stakeholders by phone (weird, but true) and on video calls. They say, “You don't understand, Jeb; our customers prefer to communicate through email.” Or, “It's really hard to get our customers on video calls.”
Field sales teams universally fear the phone and video sales calls. They whine, “You don't understand, Jeb; our customers prefer to meet face-to-face.” Or, especially when it comes to prospecting, “Nobody answers the phone and I'm so much better face-to-face.”
Jeb, you don't understand. I hear those same words every week, in every training session, wherever I am in the world.
When I'm overseas, it's, “Jeb, you don't understand because you are an American.” When I'm in North America, it's, “Jeb, you don't understand, because our company, product, service, customers, buyers, niche, vertical, geographic region [pick a card, any card] is different.”
I've heard it all. From Moscow to Milan, Lisbon to London, Shanghai to Sau Paulo, Dubuque to Dubai, and Atlanta to Amsterdam, there are a thousand excuses and justifications for why salespeople can't do something.
“Our buyers are different.”
“Our culture is different.”
“Our product is different.”
“It doesn't work like that in our industry [company, culture, country].”
“The buyers we deal with won't get on a video call.”
“My customers only meet face-to-face.”
“The buyers in our industry just commoditize us.”
It's mostly bullshit. Just lies, excuses, and delusions that sales professionals throw at me to justify their fear of a particular tool or technique. It's easier to blame it on their prospects than to look in the mirror.
So, let's just cut to the chase. The people you call on will happily schedule and jump on virtual calls with you. You just have to ask.
How do I know? Because there are real stories everywhere, including my own (above), about how prospects and customers quickly adapted to virtual sales calls because there was either no other choice or because it was faster and more convenient. Think about it: During the coronavirus pandemic, no one had a choice and we quickly adapted to virtual sales calls. Or, how many times has a customer with a problem demanded that you get on a plane or in your car and visit them right at that moment? When you explained that it was impossible for you to get there, didn't they manage to work it out with you on the phone?
One of my sales training clients sells used commercial trucks over the phone, sight unseen. These deals run from $20,000 to $200,000. Their customers can see only a picture of the truck. No test drive, no kicking the tires, no making a deal belly-to-belly. This group sells tens of thousands of trucks a year this way. It is one of the largest resellers of used commercial trucks in the world.
Is this a weird way for people to buy used commercial trucks? You bet. Do customers push back and say they have to see the truck before they buy? Absolutely. But this is the only option, and therefore thousands of buyers accept it. Once they experience how easy and painless virtual can be, they become loyal customers and buy more trucks.
This is one of the keys to successful virtual selling. When you make it a great experience for your stakeholders, they'll begin to trust the process and be open to more virtual calls. One thing you can take to the bank, though, is that prospects and customers won't accept virtual sales calls if you never ask for them.
Author's note: I use the terms prospect, stakeholder, customer, and buyer interchangeably and regularly change up terms to avoid repeating myself and boring my readers.
Virtual Selling Definition and Channels
Before we move further into the book, and to avoid confusion surrounding the term, let's stop and define virtual selling.
Traditionally, virtual has been thought of as something purely digital that takes place online versus in the physical world. Though true for software programs, online experiences, and gaming, this limited definition of virtual when applied to selling is what causes consternation within the sales community.
When salespeople or leaders hear the word virtual paired with the word selling, it's natural for many to think “robots.” They envision sales activity devoid of any human-to-human contact. This, of course, makes those who make their living through face-to-face interaction recoil. Face-to-face is their comfort zone and their skill set. It's difficult to conceive that it's possible to sell any other way.
Virtual selling is simply leveraging virtual communication channels in place of physical, face-to-face interaction.
These channels include:
Video calls
Video messaging
Telephone calls
Interactive chat
Text messaging
Email
Voicemail and audio messaging
Social media
Direct messaging
Snail mail
If you look closely at the list above, you'll notice that you are already using some, if not all, of these channels. You are already engaging in some level of virtual selling activity.
You'll also notice that all of the tools and technology that you need to engage in virtual selling communicating with prospects and customers without physically being there already exist. In addition, there are hundreds of software platforms that facilitate and simplify the use of these communication channels, both individually and working in concert.
